Tax and customs officials in Greece have gone on strike
to protest the usual taxpayer bailouts of international lenders at the
expense of social services. “The strike underlines the risks to a tax
collection drive demanded by the EU and
IMF inspectors as workers
who will themselves suffer from the austerity measures resist implementing
the new laws. Disgruntled electricity workers have already threatened to
boycott a planned property tax, designed to be collected through electricity
bills as a means of bypassing the notoriously inefficient tax authority.”

Another of Tolstoy’s didactic dialogues, this one written in
October 1909 but hidden by censorship until
after his death, called
“The
Traveler and the Peasant,” hopes to show us that the problems of the
Russian peasantry (the “99%” of their day) are of their own making and the
solutions to those problems are in their hands. If only they would stop doing
the bidding of (and paying taxes to) those who oppress them and steal from
them, and instead devote their energies to true Christian brotherhood, Tolstoy
(disguised as the Traveler) suggests, there would be no need for griping or
for revolution.

Mr. Money Mustache has an interesting post on
the true cost of commuting
that tries to do the math on just how much you are giving up when you take a
job that requires you to commute (especially by car). People choosing a job
or a home would do well to read this over and do some back-of-the-envelope
calculations.

The Early Retirement Extreme blog
now has its own wiki
at which the proprietor and his merry collaborators plan to document how “you
could retire much sooner than most think… and never need to work for money in
your life again.”

Richard Hall died on this day in 1881, and
The Friend included the following mention of his war
tax resistance in his obituary:

In upholding our religious testimony against all war, he felt that he could
not conscientiously pay a war tax, and refused to pay the addition to the
Income Tax, made to defray the expenses of the Abyssinian war.

[Canon Rawnsley
mentions] Thomas Wilkinson, the Quaker poet of Yanwath (1751)
“of yeoman stock”; early a friend of
Wordsworth;
“very little disturbed” that his carts were seized and sold to meet a
military tax that he could not conscientiously pay; “making his way by pony
and on foot 300 miles to the yearly meeting in London”

Another
source, however, says nothing of distraint for war taxes and claims that
Wilkinson chose to walk to the meetings out of concern for the welfare of
stage horses.

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